Review of the movie - Narcissistic dad

Yes! The dad was a delusional, narcissistic *beep* from start to finish. He was never interested in anyone else's affairs but his own and took every opportunity to tell childish, self laudatory stories that paint him to be heroic. His son was practically begging his father to hear a genuine account of his life yet the son was denied. The father was so obsessed with forging this fantastic image of himself that he couldn't even show his true self to his son. He probably *beep* believed his own *beep* too.

Then at the end, it's apparently justified "well actually the stories have a basis on fact (OMG NO WAY?) and he's dead so the audience should be sad and suddenly realise the father was a great guy... and that the only reason he told those stories was so his memory would become 'immortal'. i.e. until the grandchildren turn 11 years old and call his *beep* How is this self aggrandizing, deceitful behaviour anything to be admired? If he just told the *beep* truth, his stories might be taken seriously, and even be impressive. Both the younger and older father were among the most unlikeable characters I have ever encountered in any film.

"they make us view life in a different way."

Can you explain this?

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I found your observations about the father in this film to be interesting. I loved this movie and related to it. I'm the one with the "Big Fish" tales in my family and I drive my daughter and husband completely crazy if they have to hear anything about my life and stories of what I went through years ago. I'm not narcissistic, so its easy for me to see that they feel as they do. My reaction is to shut up and not tell them anything about myself, if I can help it.

Was the father a narcissist or was the son simply unwilling to ever pay attention to his father or give him any credit for his interesting and unique adventures?

I grew up with a grandmother who was a cattleman's daughter from Texas. She rode with Belle Star as a young woman, began riding horses when she was 4, smoking cigarettes at 6, and was a real, live cowgirl. Her mother, a Native American, was a midwife in the early 1900s and would take my grandmother with her to birth the babies. Grandma had stories of her uncle who went out for wood and was found in the morning with an arrow in his back, her times living in South America when my grandfather was working for Standard Oil, her life during the Great Depression and life in Texas long ago. I found her endlessly fascinating. Even if she told me the same story 25 times, I wanted to hear every word that came out of her mouth because there were always little details I hadn't heard before. Hearing the stories again and again ingrained them into my memory. I adored her and I would visit whenever I could and soak up everything I could possibly remember. My cousins thought she was nothing but a boring old lady - and who wants to listen to some old lady carry on? To them she was just an old fool and not worthy of their time. She died an old, old woman and my cousins loved her, but they knew little about her life.

So now, you tell me - was my grandmother the narcissist? Or was it my cousins who were too busy and had such fascinating lives working at the DMV?

I thought the point was that the son found his father to be terribly annoying, because he thought his father was a big liar. The father was telling big fish stories. The son couldn't remember the adventures that were the basis for the stories, so he decided his father was a liar. In the end the son meets up with the characters from his father's stories and realizes he has been misjudging his father all along. This is a Tim Burton film, so the settings are really unusual and sometimes unbelievable in order to throw the viewer off. You aren't supposed to be sure whether the father is telling the truth or a big whopping fish story until the very end. And isn't that the way life is? We don't really know whether the tales we hear are true or imagined, accurate or embellished, because the story teller has a perception of reality and they are sharing their perceptions with the listener.

I know that every single story I've ever told my husband and daughter has been accurate and truthful. I let it go and I don't make an issue of it, but the truth is that every one of the things I tell them is true and they are insulting me when they question my sincerity. Another point of the film was that you had a very normal appearing son and a father who had these whopping tales. In the end you realize the father was being completely accurate and the son was lying to himself about his father and what he had done. The son's erroneous perception of the truth had colored, twisted and badly affected his relationship with his father. The son had put up an emotional wall that separated him from his father. The son had really been disrespectful to his father all along, thinking himself to the be the righteous one all of his life in relation to his father.

Most people don't want to look at reality. They drink, smoke pot, take drugs, gamble, have affairs, get plastic surgery, spend money, throw away people, and do a wide variety of things to avoid facing the truth about life and themselves. If someone stands above the crowd, the crowd wants to chop off his head. Most people will avoid reality at all costs and this is the third point to the film, in my opinion.

It is not about narcissism , his dad made stories more interesting by embellishing it. Admit it everyone makes modifications to true stories to make it more interesting .

Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Good cinematography. Good actors. Good scenes.

Thats all.

I pity your lack of imaginative taste, OP.

My father was a motherchucker! I'd take Ed Bloom any day.

I don't love her.. She kicked me in the face!!